Tuesday, May 23, 2017

The Problem with Alienation

The Alienated Mind

Supporters of President Trump waiting for him to speak at an event in Georgia in April.Credit
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

The
campaign of 2016 was an education in the deep problems facing the
country. Angry voters made a few things abundantly clear: that modern
democratic capitalism is not working for them; that basic institutions
like the family and communities are falling apart; that we have a
college educated elite that has found ingenious ways to make everybody
else feel invisible, that has managed to transfer wealth upward to
itself, that crashes the hammer of political correctness down on anybody
who does not have faculty lounge views.

As Robert W. Merry put it recently in The American Conservative, “When a man as uncouth and reckless as
Trump becomes president by running against the nation’s elites, it’s a
strong signal that the elites are the problem.”

The
last four months, on the other hand, have been an education in the
shortcomings in populism. It’s not only that Donald Trump is a bad
president. It’s that movements fueled by alienation are bound to fail.

Alienation,
the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote, is a “state of mind that can find a
social order remote, incomprehensible or fraudulent; beyond real hope
or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility.”

The
alienated long for something that will smash the system or change their
situation, but they have no actual plan or any means to deliver it. The
alienated are a hodgepodge of disparate groups. They have no positive
agenda beyond the sort of fake shiny objects Trump ran on (Build a
Wall!). They offer up no governing class competent enough to get things
done.

As Yuval Levin argues in a brilliant essay in Modern Age, “Alienation can sometimes make for a powerful organizing principle for an electoral coalition. … But it does not make for a natural organizing principle for a governing coalition.”

Worse,
alienation breeds a distrust that corrodes any collective effort. To be
“woke” in the alienated culture is to embrace the most cynical
interpretation of every situation, to assume bad intent in every actor,
to imagine the conspiratorial malevolence of your foes.

Alienation
breeds a hysterical public conversation. Its public intellectuals are
addicted to overstatement, sloppiness, pessimism, and despair. They are
self-indulgent and self-lionizing prophets of doom who use formulations
like “the Flight 93 election” — who speak of every problem as if it were the apocalypse.

Alienation
also breeds a zero-sum mind-set — it’s us or them — and with it a
tribal clannishness and desire for exclusion. As Levin notes, on the
right alienation can foster a desire for purity — to exclude the foreign
— and on the left it can foster a desire for conformity — to squelch
differing speakers and faiths.

The
events of the past four months have demonstrated that Donald Trump is
not going to solve the problem he was elected to address; neither the
underlying economic and social ruptures nor the alienation that emerges
from them.

The
events of the past four months illustrate that we do need a political
establishment in this country, or maybe a few competing establishments.
We need people who have been educated to actually know something about
public policy problems. We need people who have had gradual, upward
careers in government and understand the craft of wielding power. We
need people who know how to live up to certain standards of integrity
and public service.

But
going forward we need a better establishment, one attuned to Trump
voters, those whose alienation grows out of genuine suffering.

The
first task for this better establishment is to not make the political
chasm worse. As the impeachment investigation proceeds, it’ll be
important for us Trump critics to not set our hair on fire every day, to
evaluate the evidence as if it were against a president we ourselves
voted for. Would we really throw our own candidate out of office for
this?

Over
the longer term, it will be necessary to fight alienation with
participation, to reform and devolve the welfare state so that
recipients are not treated like passive wards of the state, but take an
active role in their own self-government.

It’ll
be necessary to revive a living elite patriotism. That means conducting
oneself in office as if nation is more important than party; not using
executive orders, filibusters and the nuclear option to grab what you
can while you happen to be in the majority. It means setting up weekly
encounters to help you respect and understand the fellow Americans who
reside across the social chasms.

Finally,
it’ll be necessary to fight alienation with moral realism, with a
mature mind-set that says that, yes, people are always flawed, the
country always faces problems, but that is no reason for lazy cynicism
or self-righteous despair. If you start with an awareness of human
foibles, then you can proceed with what Levin calls pessimistic
hopefulness — grateful for the institutions our ancestors left us, and
filled with cheerful confidence that they can be reformed to solve
present needs.

Impeached
or not, it’s hard to see how Trump recovers as an effective governing
force. Now is the moment for a new establishment to organize, to address
the spirit of alienation that gave rise to Trump, but which transcends
him.

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About Me

This is a blog about what interests me. Here you will find stories on animals, including animal rights material, cute stuff, and random informative posts about weird, beautiful and interesting creatures. Horses, Spotted Hyenas, and Border Collies will make regular appearances.
Also prominently featured will be posts about the Arts. Animation, photography, and the traditional forms, plus "outsider art," film and books.
Other things that will surface here are Japan & the Japanese, John Oliver, surfing, skateboarding and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, interesting places and structures,and my own art, writing and photography.
There will be rants. It's an election year, and I am beginning to have a political dimension to my personality. I am also horrified at the level of injustice and violence visited upon people here in the US and elsewhere - particularly against people of color, immigrants, and the LGBT community. Some of these stories will be very hard to read, but I believe we must read them to keep ourselves mindful of the racist and vicious things that happen every day, to speak out when we see discrimination, and root out its evil from ourselves.